I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Christian

Before I say anything else, I'd like to be clear on one thing: I never have and never will ally myself with the slogan "it's a relationship, not a religion." Christianity is a religion and while it is true to say that it is also a relationship, to say that it is a relationship instead of a religion is to deny our entire intellectual heritage and our intellectual validity. If we want a seat at the table when the naturalists and postmodernists argue over the nature of evil, the existence of moral absolutes, and the purpose (or absence thereof) of life, if we want to shine a lantern amongst the philosophical will o' wisps of our age, then we must stand firm and profess boldly that the Church is all that it is and nothing less. We must not give in to the anti-intellectual fads or the connotations that secularists have pinned on to our language.

However, my attitude when it comes to being identified as a "religious person" is quite another thing. It is quite truthful and fitting that the word "religion" should be used to describe Christianity as a whole, but only occasionally would I ever admit the word "religious" to be an appropriate adjective to assign to a person. There are three main reasons for this, but first I think it is best to explain how the word can be used appropriately.

Obviously, the use of any adjective is only sensible in the presence of other possible characteristics which would exclude it; when we say that something has a given characteristic (such as the color blue), we are implying that there is another characteristic it could have had but doesn't have (such as the color red) because that role is taken up by the actual characteristic. Thus, a church service is properly called a religious gathering because it is intentionally connected to the religion of Christianity instead of being a mere party which is not consciously structured around any ideology. If written down and distributed, the sermon delivered at the service would be considered a religious speech or essay because it was openly founded on the intellectual framework of a religious worldview. An essay written by the same man for an audience of nonbelievers would not take the same ideas for granted and for this and other reasons it would not necessarily be considered a religious document (or at least not religious in the same way) even if the point of the essay was to advocate a Christian worldview.

Now my first objection to being called religious is that in at least one very important sense there is no other kind of person. A religion is a comprehensive set of beliefs which includes a supernatural understanding of the universe and typically involves reverence for someone or something. The problem is that every single person who has ever lived has had to struggle with the questions of God, life after death, and fate, not to mention the fact that beauty and ethics are also either supernatural or nonexistent. Additionally, even those who deny the existence of the supernatural still subscribe to some ideology which answers all the same questions that a religion (as a set of comprehensive beliefs) must answer. Everyone has something that they hold sacred whether it is God or freedom or science, and everyone has some definition of goodness that they hold to whether it is human empowerment or the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people or the glory of God.

You might come across people who treat these issues as mysteries and claim to be ignorant or neutral concerning them (and you may even be such a person yourself), but they are neither evidence of ideological neutrality nor an exception to a generally true rule. If you sat down with such a person, you would easily find out what they really believe by either trying to persuade them of a particular worldview or asking them a particularly radical question concerning whatever issue it is they claim to be ignorant of. In the former case you might explain to an agnostic what Hindus believe (with most agnostics I suspect that eastern philosophy would be particularly effective) and then they would probably either show interest or express distaste at certain points, thus betraying their vague but still present assumptions about reality. In the latter case if the person in question is not certain of the objectivity of moral law you might ask them if the Holocaust was an evil act---I'm sure you can imagine the results for yourself. The point of the matter is that those who don't claim to have any ideology really do have answers to the essential human questions, they just  have very vague answers along with divisions within themselves between multiple and conflicting answers. In short, everyone has some ideology and everyone is guided in their actions (or at least in how they believe they should act) by that ideology. There is still the division between those whose ideologies include the supernatural and those whose ideologies exclude it, but if the word "religious" is to be used to describe someone who is fervent in their beliefs that is really a very small difference.

Of course there is still the sense in which people use the term to describe someone who is specifically dedicated to a "spiritual" ideology rather than a secular one. The problem with this case is simply that such a usage covers too broad and diverse a group. Christianity may agree with Islam about the existence of God and the inherent goodness of that God, but they are still fundamentally opposed to each other when it comes to salvation. On top of that there is the difference between the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism, which teaches that God is essentially without any kind of personality and that everything (including all evil things) are part of Him, and it may be wondered if the rift really is any wider between the two than it is between either of them and any given secular philosophy. Add to that the fact that some religious worldviews are actually atheistic, and it is very hard to see how referring to a person as "religious" could be even remotely helpful in really describing that person.

Finally, there is the issue of behavior. In this case, one might be called "religious" because of the way in which they behave. Thus a "religious person" is someone who adheres to high moral standards. The problem is that even outside Christianity the issue of whether or not someone is a believer is determined first and foremost by what they believe and what they are trying to do. This use of the word implies a viciously legalistic attitude which is at least partially inaccurate in terms of religion in generally and wildly inaccurate when it comes to Christianity in particular. The Christian creed is founded on the doctrine that we are all evil and that we can never be justified in the sight of God except by His own death on our behalf. It is true that if we are saved we should behave better than we would otherwise, but that doesn't make falling short of God's commandments proof of hypocrisy. I once saw a scene on television in which a man said that he probably shouldn't be in a church with all the sins in his life, and I was simply shocked. If your life is full of sin (and I can guarantee you that it absolutely is) the first place you should be is a church!

It is for these reasons that I resent being called religious. It is a singularly useless term which I once used as an agnostic to say that a Christian is a certain kind of person just as a mailman is a certain type of person rather than someone engaging in the relationship for which we are all made. I'm not a religious person. I am not someone who is defined by regular church attendance. I am not a special kind of person. I am an evil wretch who knows he's an evil wretch, knows that only God can fix that, believes that God has done something to fix that, and lives in dependence on the mercy of that God. I'm a Christian.